My distro of choice is Debian (I like their philosophy and it works great on my laptop) but I have an nVidia card in my desktop PC, and driver management was kind of annoying. Decided to try Kubuntu, which worked ok, but I didn’t really love, and then I didn’t update for a bit too long and had some repo issues trying to install updates. I didn’t bother digging into what the fix would be, since I had been considering Bazzite for a while, as it has been talked about a lot for gaming.
Knowing literally nothing other than “Bazzite works out of the box with nVidia” I figured I’d give it a go. First off, I was surprised at the size of the image, and how long the install took. I did some reading about atomic distros and began to understand why things were set up that way. Seems pretty cool! I still don’t love that as soon as I logged in on my fresh install, Steam opened up and asked for a log in, but that is what I signed up for with Bazzite, I guess. The nVidia drivers out of the box worked fantastic, as advertised, and I love a good KDE desktop, so it’s not all bad.
Initially I was frustrated that some things weren’t working in the flatpak versions of the app (couldn’t get to my 3d printer using the .local address from the browser because flatpak has a bug with mDNS) and layering a package with rpm-ostree seems like overkill and not a good experience. Then I watched some videos on distrobox.
I can just distrobox create --image debian:latest debian-box and then use apt install for whatever packages I want, export them and use them as if they were natively installed on Bazzite??? And this works on any distro??? I have been using Linux exclusively for a few years (and on and off for more years), but I have been totally out of the loop with distrobox and atomic distros. This feels like the same level of magic I felt when I first dual booted Ubuntu back in the Windows Vista days. This seems like it will fix 99% of the issues I run into on Linux.
I know distrobox isn’t exclusive to atomic distros, but I wouldn’t have discovered it if not for Bazzite.
Anyway, none of this is really new info, but I just wanted to nerd out about it for a bit with people who will know what I’m talking about.
I had used Ubuntu in the past, but ran into some wifi driver issues when installing it on my new laptop, fast forward a few years, and I was ready to give Linux another go. I read that Bazzite was pre-optimized for gaming, and I figured everything else I want to do should be relatively easy in comparison.
I’ve been impressed by how clean and no nonsense the interface is, and is just a solid daily driver OS. I’ve been slowly learning the nuances of what it means to be an Atomic Desktop, but I still get confused about the proper way to install things if they can’t be found in the flatpak discovery tool. Pretty sure I have two versions of Chrome installed right now. That’s not a problem with Bazzite though, just a new-to-linux problem.
you have 2 major package managers (ootb) on bazzite iirc - flatpak and rpm (through rpmtree). ideally - do not install anything through latter. that is the one that requires the cli. if you can not find a package on flatpak (very common if you want a cli thing, or a niche gui software, or some browsers), then try to find if it is served elsewhere. for example, as this post highlights very nicely - use distrobox. for example, use distrobox and add arch (for example), and you can get new cli stuff.
for chrome, if you have 2 versions, either you have 2 different flatpaks, or 1 from rpmtree, for that, try using
rpm-ostree search chrome(or some other package name, for example chromium). you may also just want to dochro(in a terminal window) and then press tab (once or twice) to get completion options. that should help you with name of package most likely.